A History of Scotland's Landscapes by Fiona Watson with Piers Dixon

Some books are simply enjoyable. Others are a joy. "A History of Scotland's
Landscapes" by Fiona Watson with Piers Dixon is both. There's something
about a large, beautifully-produced and magnificently-illustrated
book that brings out the inner five-year-old in all of us: the sense
of "wow" as you first open the book and leaf through, simply soaking
in the pictures and the scale of the authors' achievement.

You get an excellent sense of what the book is about from the front
flap of the dust jacket. "It is easy to overlook how much of our history
is preserved all around us - the way the narrative of bygone days
has been inscribed in fields, forests, hills and mountains, roads,
railways, canals, lochs, buildings and settlements. Indeed, footprints
of the past are to be found almost everywhere... 'A History of Scotland's
Landscapes' explores the many ways that we have used, adapted and
altered our environment over thousands of years. Full of maps, photographs
and drawings, it offers a remarkable new perspective on Scotland -
a unique guide to tracing memories, events and meanings in the forms
and patterns of our surroundings."

The book begins with a thought-provoking preface, an account of what
can be seen and learned during the course of a single twenty-minute
drive through Perthshire, and also has an introduction, a conclusion,
and some fascinating land-use maps. These apart, the book is divided
into four long chapters, looking at settlement, farming, industry
and infrastructure, and leisure. Though the illustrations are plentiful
and superb (and often very large), this is by no means just a picture
book. The chapter on settlement begins with prehistoric dwellings
and monuments before moving on through castles to towns and villages.
A two-page aerial colour photograph that shows the remains of a crofting
township on the Island of Scarp, off Harris in the Western Isles,
makes a superbly eloquent point about the scale of depopulation in
the last two centuries. Conversely, an equally-impressive and equally-large
aerial photograph of Dundee taken in 1988 shows the scale of expansion
and development over the ages.

The chapter on industry
and infrastructure begins with Roman forts and roads, and progresses
via shale oil and lead mining to an industrialised and then
almost post-industrial nation; while we see coal and nuclear power
being largely replaced by power generation through more renewable
means. We spent ages trying to fit an aerial photograph taken in 1927
of the huge oil shale works at Broxburn in West Lothian into a map of the modern
landscape of the area, without complete success: but that's half the
fun of old photographs. The chapter on leisure ranges from royal hunting
forests through landed hunting estates to gardens and golf, again
with an emphasis on what you can still see on the ground.

An outstanding book likely to be of immense value to anyone who takes
an interest in the landscapes we see around us in Scotland.